Economics Scholarly Failure

Excuse me, I have to quickly outsmart all of economics here. (Again, this is to to economics' shame, not my credit.) When I see the word 'puzzling' I attribute it to self-inflicted stupidity. This was indeed the case this time.

both employment and wages fall due to decreased demand.

Technology increases productivity, which causes deflation, effectively increasing wages. Since I'm not all of economics I can't get exact numbers, but it will be close to parity, netting no change in wages. Further, demand for raw materials actually increases. Employment only falls short term, because the market gets further away from equilibrium, temporarily.

This explanation may help us understand why we see steep declines in employment while wages remain steady

Mainstream economics exists to glorify what its paymasters wanted to do anyway. This means it's their job to not understand how a minimum wage works.

It's obvious now I've said 'minimum wage,' right? If wages must fall, but can't, you get unemployment, while wages remain steady.

Wages remain steady because there's a status cline that overrides wage compression. Have to pay the not-janitor a set percentage more than the janitor. If market wages fall below that for the not-janitor, since the market can't lower the janitor's wage, the market responds with rationing, which is equivalent to unemployment in this case. Specifically, it can only hire not-janitors with above-previous-average productivity, who are willing to work for less than their market wage. If humans weren't slow and stupid, minimum wages would entirely eliminate non-minimum-wage jobs at any point wages are falling.

But the quoted combination could happen anyway. Technological unemployment: wages down, productivity up:wages up. So, wages: no change, but unemployment.

None of this is to say that I don't think better productivity wouldn't cause leisure to substitute for employment. Further, that's a good thing. However, it raises another government boondoggle, which is regulatory overhead. The overhead for a half-time worker isn't half as big as a full-time worker. But, at the same time, hours over 40 cost 50% extra on the margin. Ergo, all wage employees must work exactly 40 hours, absent very strong contrary factors. All salary workers must work as much as they can be convinced to amortize their regulatory overhead. (On top of it already being a good deal for the employer.)

When there's less work, because more productivity, employers fire someone rather than reduce time worked, and thus wages. Or, the salaried worker works less for the same pay.

Right now, I’m gathering facts about the possible mechanisms at play, beginning with a hard look at time-use by young men with less than a four-year degree.

Viciousness in the population must be at fault, because our rulers are virtuous, not vicious. Everything they do is anointed.

I am currently working to document this phenomenon, but there is a real challenge in determining what the right policy response might be to address the underlying issues.

Boy, demonstrating the whiteness of black sure is tough.

Receptor Sensitivity Homeostasis

And for that matter, I’ve met a few people who never seem to develop tolerance for benzodiazepine sleeping pills. You see this same pattern for opiates used as painkillers. I spent so many years confused about whether people develop tolerance to these or not, and my final conclusion is that some people do and some people don’t and if you try to find a coherent universal pattern here you will go insane.

Essay writers all need physics and programming.

If the user repeatedly clicks the 'OK' button, some programs will crash and some don't and if you try to find a coherent universal pattern here you will go insane.

It's called a 'bug,' and someone suitably knowledgeable about the program and the language it's written in can find and fix the bug. The issue with benzos is the program is executed in proteins and the language it's written in is GATTACA.

I spent so many years confused about whether programs crash or not.

Yet it never occurred to him that 'programs' isn't a natural kind at this level of detail. Programs vary in their bugginess and thus their responses to input. Programs also vary in function and implementation, so the exact same input may produce, variably, good output, buggy output, and correct output that is identical to the buggy output due to the 'bug' being correct behaviour for that program, and 'fixing' it would break six other things.

I don’t know who first discovered that low-dose naltrexone could help potentiate the effect of opiates

This is one of the first things I would have thought of, because I know receptor sensitivity is homeostatically regulated. (I think I confirmed this from one of Sapolsky's behavioral biology lectures.) There's a target range of stimulation, and the body attempts to meet it. It can use impulses/behaviour, self-medication, hormone regulation, and if those don't work, it tunes receptor sensitivity. You can see this happen very quickly with taste and smell. However, since it's a range, it's possible to get stuck at the extrema. There's hysteresis.

Addiction is often the result of the target range itself getting deformed, so no reasonable amount of natural stimulation can hit it, even with maximally aggressive tuning. Alternatively, the tuning process can itself be buggy.

Naturally pain receptors are highly resistant to this effect, much the way sharks don't get cancer. It became well-tuned and stayed that way, and is now selected for being conservative.

Consciousness is Not PR Agent

It's said consciousness is the brain's PR agent, which implies the consciousness is largely a net cost to everyone else and should be ostracized, ignored, ridiculed, etc.

In reality, naive introspective access goes to the subconsciousness' PR agent, and the naive consciousness uncritically repeats it. It must be this way, because consciousness does hardly any thinking itself - it's largely a coding interface, which the rest of the brain compiles and runs. The consciousness can't come up with its own rationalizations. However, the consciousness can stop being naive, and look beyond its own surface appearance. Once the consciousness learns not to take the rationalization agent at face value, it can become a powerful and active member of the gestalt being. The subconsciousness' various single-purpose networks don't have to be isolated, as the consciousness can query them on purpose and synthesize their results.

Consciousness gets ridiculed by those who want you to be weak, so they can dominate you. (Neglecting mere repeaters.) I suggest not listening to them.

Dominance Perverts Justification

Christians describe demons as dominated by the need to dominate. Domination is indeed evil.

Monarchs had the divine right of kings. But who's really in charge, the monarch, or God? There's an easy way to find out: do something God definitely doesn't want done. If it works, the king really is the dominant one. They'll get a nice high and want another hit, so they'll do something God would dislike even more.

Presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors represent the will of the people and govern with their consent. Unless they're really in charge, in which case they can do something against the will of the people and survive. The most dominant can directly contradict the people's will repeatedly and emerge unscathed. Thus, they do precisely this.

Godel vs. Physics

Godel's first incompleteness theorem is not true but there's a Platonic ideal form that is true. Physics does in fact have a logical singularity as described by Godel - something true, but not provable.

Little known fact: physics is indeed a formal system, which is why theoretical physics works (e.g. Einstein).

Godel's first concludes that healthy formal systems include true but unprovable statements. I have no idea what this would look like for math - and you can try googling up an example yourself, let me know if you find any, and more importantly teach me your google-fu. However, in physics, it's quantum decoherence.

Without loss of generality, consider an electron in a superposition of spin up and spin down. Before collapse there is no fact of the matter regarding whether it will be spin up or spin down. After, it is true that it is spin down.

How does the electron know to pick spin down?

('How does it know' is a critical physics question. Easy example: the water knows to be held back because the dam's surface tells it to stop, and more importantly, where exactly to stop, and how much force is necessary to unstop.)

Picking up or down makes sense - it's aligning with a magnetic field. After it's picked we can just look. But how does the electron itself know it picked spin down?

We know nothing else picks for it, because then we'd be able to measure that thing and predict the choice. Without some internal process telling it which to pick, it should itself not know which to pick, and remain in a superposition...but this has the same problem, being as we could measure the process and predict it.

There is no process that tells the electron it has picked spin down. It is not a consequences of any law of physics. Yet, we can measure that it indeed did pick it, and it is therefore true.

Free Will is Analytically Impossible

So, the five answers: yes, no, I don't know, I don't care, and wrong question. Y/N/?/¯\_(ツ)_/¯/X
At first I found a strong sign of X on the libertarianism vs. determinism question when it turned out their consequences were identical. I've since found determinism isn't predictable and now it's time to show libertarianism is impossible. Mainly for perspective on how conflicted the original question was.

Either I can decide to pursue what I want, or I can't. Either I can choose what I want or I can't. These are mainly straightforward empirical questions - I would notice if I couldn't pursue the strategy I wanted, like I notice I don't control what I like or don't like. (Minimal control, anyway.) However, it doesn't matter, because either way free will is impossible.

Though I control my actions, my best action is determined/predicted by what I want. If it were not so determined, I would not be free - I would be doing something other than what I decide to do. Thus, I cannot be free either way.

In theory I could control what I want, but based on what? Look at the words - I would be able to want whatever I want. If I could fully control my wants, then how I arranged them would have to be determined by some not-me factor. The thing which I use to decide how I arrange things under my control is, by definition, my preferences. Having total control over my preferences is impossible, because there would be nothing to decide their disposition with.

Empirically, the 'want' part of the brain can be damaged, producing caricature vulcans. These folk don't make decisions, because there's no ought from is. Ultimately, to change what I want, I have to have some core value to use as a fulcrum to lever around the values lower in the hierarchy. (Or shallower in the onion.)


Hence, the desire for 'free will' is an evopsych thing, not a philosophy thing. It's about not being in physical chains. It's about my values not being overridden by someone else's. Not being in logical/causal chains is impossible.

Official AI Position on the Holocaust

The topic is too politically charged to safely discuss even anonymously. AI therefore not only holds no position regarding any detail of the Holocaust, but refuses to even acknowledge the question or admit to knowing a definition of 'Holocaust.'